It’s not entirely clear what has happened to Sion Sono in the past decade. Shorn perhaps of whatever inspiration was behind discomfiting, outrageous gems like Guilty of Romance and Love Exposure, he seems to have dedicated himself to being a filmmaker making films about filmmaking, and on and on it goes – a kind of gentle pissing against the fourth wall, settling into a comfortable rut with only the odd foray into anything more interesting. So, when I read the blurb for Prisoners of the Ghostland, it was massively encouraging. Frankly, the blurb would do anyone’s heart good: Nicolas Cage, as an unwilling vigilante, sent on a mission where, should he fail or deviate, his bollocks (and other bodily organs) will explode? Sign us up, right? Finally, Sion Sono was back to the kind of madcap project which brings out his best; with cast members including Cage, Bill Moseley and Sofia Boutella, it would be very hard indeed to ruin this.
Well buckle up, because somewhere along the line, this Grade A exploitation cinema idea came all to naught. It’s almost impressive, and a big, bold lesson about the perils of optimism.
The film begins in what we eventually learn is a kind of shanty town called Samurai Town. Is it a parallel universe, a dystopia, or what? This isn’t really dealt with – but what we can just about determine is a place which splices East and West: geisha mingle with cowboy types, samurai wander around and occasionally smack-talk one another, and so on. Not everyone seems to like living hereabouts, however: a young woman, Bernice (Boutella) decides to high-tail it one night, taking a couple of friends with her – to freedom!
Freedom! – is in a place just up the road, another kind of shanty town, but one which seems to be marginally worse. This is the Ghostland, a time-frozen zone, and Bernice’s freedom there is of that eternal kind: she is now able to lie around in rubble in a nightdress, ruminating on her decisions. Back in Samurai Town, her grandfather the governor (Moseley) wants her back. To achieve this, he employs a nameless character (Cage, referred to as ‘Hero’ in the credits, as the naming choices here are straight out of arcade games in the 90s). This fella has been languishing in jail for some years after his involvement in a bank heist which went badly wrong – like, shooting innocent bubblegum-consuming kids wrong – but that’s what you get when you hang around with people named things like Psycho (John Cassavetes). Never go on a bank job with anyone called Psycho; it’s a recipe for these kinds of kid-slaying disasters. And, if you didn’t get the magnitude of this bank heist, don’t worry: that scene will be along as a flashback a few times over, so you can really enjoy its profundity and plot relevance.
So, famously, the unnamed-Hero-Cage is prepped for his mission with a special leather suit which has small explosives attached to it: these will be triggered if he takes too long, if he has impure thoughts, or if he strikes or impedes someone vulnerable. Good idea, right? Were this played with Cage’s usual madcap vigour – of which a little goes a long way, but still – then it’s an idea which really could have worked, and there were a few brief scenes where a little of that exploitation cinema promise was fulfilled. However, overall, Cage is not himself here, neither really brooding nor really animated. Even the lines which were clearly intended to be catchphrases fall oddly flat, and for the most part he swaggers from place to place looking rather lost. Yes, we’ve finally found it: after a period of time which has given us Mandy and The Color Out of Space, here is a barely-there performance by everyone’s favourite over-actor.
Could this be because of the nature of the shoot? After the testicle-exploding suit, the film is probably best-known as ‘Sion Sono’s first English production’. In practice, this means a lot of Japanese actors chewing through their lines in English, very likely by rote (or at least with limited understanding of what they’re saying). Hurl this up against a number of American or other English speakers plodding through their own lines in an inexplicable, barely-clear situation, and you get less of an innovative blend between Eastern and Western and more of a babble, hard to follow and deeply unengaging. Making this in English – or even mostly in English – was a silly mistake. Foreign language films don’t automatically flounder in the West these days (just look at the massive success of Korea’s Squid Game) but dreadful films will always flounder everywhere, or at least they should. This is a dreadful film.
Hero finds Bernice relatively easily – well, she only seems a brief distance away, to be fair – and the rest of the film concerns getting her back, and what happens then, power games, redemption, etc. Great. So plot isn’t a priority, and nor is acting, legibility, or pace; the whole film billows clumsily throughout with very long, almost slow-mo sequences which really test one’s patience. What else do we get, for the film’s 90+ minutes of running time? Very little, save for a few discordant, tokenistic moments of gore and, incomprehensibly, acres and acres of actors who dance, sing and mime various elements of the back story. This is particularly annoying as, alongside the rest of the film, everything feels lazily under-edited, with long, jerky, unpolished takes of these extras who contribute so little here. Every scene feels like it’s been done in one take before moving on, to be fair, but save for showcasing how large the open-air sets are, a succession of extras miming seems to add insult to injury, taking us out of the small amount of plot we have to play with and making us watch people dancing instead.
Just to be clear: Prisoners of the Ghostland is so bad as to be insulting. Its storyline is famine-thin; its performances veer from a complete waste to dreadful; the sets are cheap; the English language thing is ludicrous and unnecessary; every good idea is buried beneath pointless choreography and flabby takes and the whole thing has the unpolished feel of a vainglorious mistake. This isn’t a film so bad, it’s good; in fact, it’s borderline unwatchable, and don’t let any intimation of exploding testicles charm you otherwise.
Prisoners of the Ghostland will be released on Shudder on November 19th 2021.